Toncoin (TON), the native token of The Open Network, has been getting hammered, dropping 20% after Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, got himself arrested in France.
Pavel, fresh off a flight from Azerbaijan, was grabbed by French authorities at Le Bourget airport in Paris. Why? They slapped him with charges over Telegram’s alleged slack on content moderation, which, they say, allowed all sorts of illegal crap to go down—fraud, drug trafficking, and even pedo stuff.
Not exactly the headlines the crypto community wanted to see.
TON was sitting pretty at around $7 before this mess hit the fan. But as soon as news broke, it tanked to a low of $5.31. We’re talking a serious faceplant here, folks—20% in a blink. That sent the market cap crashing from over $17 billion to just about $13.4 billion.
And yeah, it bounced back a bit to around $14 billion, but it’s still looking rough. TON’s fate is pretty much tied to Telegram’s hip, given it was once a baby of Telegram’s own projects before it found its footing under the TON Foundation.
Now, with Pavel in hot water, everyone’s wondering where TON’s headed next. The coin slipped below its support line in a symmetrical triangle pattern on August 24, signaling that the bears had the bulls cornered.
The chart’s long tail on August 25 showed bulls trying hard to bounce off a $5.25 support, but no dice. They couldn’t keep up the momentum. Now, the bears are back, trying to drag the price below that $5.25 mark again.
If they manage to push it through, we might see the token slide all the way down to $4.72. And if that happens, buckle up—it’ll confirm a nasty bearish head-and-shoulders pattern.
The only flicker of hope for TON right now is if it breaks above the 20-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at $6.34. Get past that, and it might just claw its way up to the 50-day Simple Moving Average (SMA) of $6.66.
Though let’s not get too excited—TON needs to show some serious strength, and with Pavel in custody, confidence is shaky.
But wait, there’s more. Notcoin (NOT), another crypto that runs on the TON blockchain and is linked to a “tap-to-earn” game in Telegram, got hit just as hard.
It dropped 24% too, from $0.012 to $0.0091. Its market cap also fell off a cliff, going from $1.2 billion to below $950 million.
